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Satoru doesn’t like June. People seem to think it’s pleasant, and maybe, compared to August, it is. But Gojo is hot at night even in the cold months, and the arrival of the year’s first real heat is an annoyance he cannot forgive. Utahime likes to tease him when she sees him turning down the air conditioner before bed, but he doesn’t think that’s fair when she’s always cool.
He can’t use her to cool himself. He’s tried, but after a few minutes, as she absorbs his heat, it starts to feel pointless. So the blissful coolness of the left side of their bed belongs to Utahime alone.
Not tonight, though.
The only thing that Gojo can sense after he wakes with misplaced urgency is thirst. His body feels like it’s burning, and he can feel his damp clothes clinging to his skin. Even more than the carried-over panic from his dream, he feels a desperate need to find water, and his body moves without instruction until something cool touches his retreating back.
He stops, his heart pounding. A cool, small hand fists around the fabric of his shirt.
“Satoru,” she says, groggy. “Wha’s’it?”
Her hand isn’t even that cold. Somehow it still feels like the water he so badly wants.
“Nothin’,” he tells her, detaching her hand from the back of his shirt. “Just need water.”
He’s used to these excuses now. Even when he’s panicked and half-awake and nothing moves down the right paths in his brain, they come easily. That doesn’t mean that she believes them, though.
“Satoru,” she repeats. He hears her feet hit the floor and pad over to his side of the bed, then follow him out into the hall. “Did you have a dream again?”
“Nah.” Go away, he thinks. “Just hot.”
She steps in front of the cabinet that holds their drinking glasses, arms crossed. Great.
“Satoru,” she says crossly, “you look horrible.”
“Oh, yeah? Good to know.”
He reaches over her shoulder for a glass, but she catches his wrist before he can. “Satoru.”
“Go back to bed. You’ve got work early.”
“I’m not kidding, Satoru, you look terrible.”
He probably does – covered in sweat, his hair mussed from thrashing in the night. His face probably gives away more than he wants it to. Without his permission, his arm goes limp in her hand.
She looks at him like she was waiting for it to do that. Too gently for someone who’s only half-awake, she sets his hand on the counter, and with her now-free hand she cups his cheek.
“We don’t have to talk,” she murmurs. “Just don’t lie to me.”
Her hand feels even cooler against his flushed cheek. Hesitantly, and not entirely out of want, Gojo moves it away.
“You don’t have to worry about it, I promise.”
“Mm, look in a mirror, Satoru.” With the thumbs, she traces the sunken half-circles of exhaustion beneath his eyes. “I think I kinda do.”
“Would you please go back to bed?”
Her jaw sets. Now she’s angry.
“You haven’t been sleeping. I’m not ignoring that anymore.”
Finally, she moves aside to let him get his glass, and he drinks it half-down in a single sip. It doesn’t bring the relief it was meant to, but he tells himself it did and replies, “I sleep fine.”
“Is this because you think I’m going to ask what it was about?”
“It’s because I’m fine, Hime.”
She lets her crossed arms drop to her sides, and after a stiff moment of staring up at him with no success, she reaches for a strand of her hair. He watches her wrap it around her finger and unwrap it again a few times, a gesture he knows to signify indecision.
“You were talking to yourself this time,” she finally says. “Muttering things.”
There’s no point anymore, he realizes. He’s not going to be able to brush this aside. “Oh.”
“You don’t usually do that.”
So she’s only trying to tease out of him what she already knows.
“What was I saying?”
Utahime shakes her head. Sparing him, probably. Maybe she just knows that he has a pretty good guess.
“You never want to wake me,” she says, looking at the counter instead of at him, “but I do anyway.”
“I’m…I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I can sleep on the couch. If…if you want.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to be nice about it.”
She steps forward and takes his face, again, in her hands. It’s not so warm this time, but her hands are still cool.
“It’s not like that, you know.”
He can’t get his lips to move. His hands wrap around her wrists, and that’s the only answer he can manage.
“No one’s going to punish you for needing help.”
“I don’t need help.”
“Someone to talk to, then.”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Someone to sit up all night with you. Whatever it is you won’t let yourself admit you want.”
She’s not supposed to know that he wants all of those things, but her expression is soft and full of something only a little less insulting than pity, and that has to mean she does. His face flushes an angry, splotchy red; a few seconds and he thinks his stiff jaw will give out and start to shake.
And then she’ll hold his face in her small, cool hands and look at him like something to be pitied.
And he’ll want it. He always does want the things he shouldn’t accept.
“I don’t…I don’t want…that.”
“Okay.”
Nothing more than that. She pushes her thumbs gently into his temples to massage away the tightness in his face, but she doesn’t push or pry or insist. She must be exhausted this early in the morning, but it she doesn’t show.
“If you figure out what you do want,” she tells him after a few minutes of quiet, “you know where to find me.”
He watches her go and he should be amazed that that worked, that she did what he asked her to. But mostly what he feels as he watches her walk further from him is a gaping sense of the loss.
He can pretend that he wants to be alone, try to spare her the inconvenience and himself the pain of telling her why he woke her in the middle of the night, but that won’t make him mean it. Not in any way that counts, at least.
“Hime,” he calls, scratchy with the need for more water than what he’s had. “Wait.”
It’s just past two. Gojo feels feverish with lingering fear and the unwelcome warmth of the night. When he closes his eyes, the skeletons at his feet scrabble for purchase they can’t find, and he can feel the cold of something slashing through skin at the nape of his neck, and his head is so heavy he can’t see, and something that looks like Megumi is lifeless at his feet, or maybe all of that at once, and he never remembers details but he knows that he can’t go back to sleep.
But she is cool and small and soft, and when she holds his face in her cupped palms, he can almost believe that everything will be quiet if he tries to sleep again.
She doesn’t really seem surprised to hear him call her. She turns, but says nothing; her expression doesn’t change.
Anybody else’s knees would buckle under his folded-over weight, draped over Utahime like heavy cloth, but not her. Anybody else would tell him to get off. Utahime, instead, smooths down the wispy hair at the base of his undercut.
“I’m gonna wake up whether you want me to or not,” she whispers. “Get used to it.”
“Don’t do that.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to let me be useful sometimes.”
“That’s not-“
“It isn’t often you need something from me.”
That might be the most ridiculous thing Gojo Satoru has ever heard. He should tell her that, but his thoughts are too jumbled, and even on a good day he doesn’t know how to put the reasons he needs her into words.
“You’re always cold,” he says instead. “Even when it’s too hot.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Mm?”
“Change the subject. I know you heard me.”
He did, but she probably knows she isn’t going to get an answer. There’s no point in pushing him, and she won’t. Going back to bed, a part of him wishes that she would, but the greater part is much more content with laying his head on her chest when she offers so she can comb his fingers through his hair.
She’s trying to trick him into falling asleep and he knows that. He can’t afford to give in and see the things he’s so good at blocking out when sleep doesn’t keep his guard down. But everything about her is cool and soft and steady, and he is none of those things.
He’s never been able to afford soft things, but it’s easier at times like this to give in and chase them anyway.
“I don’t wanna sleep, Hime.”
“You need to.”
“Can’t.”
“You have me this time.”
How he wishes that meant anything. No one has any power over the places his mind goes when he closes his eyes.
“Can’t.” Everything feels so heavy he can barely get out a word. “Not gonna.”
He’s losing. He knows he must be.
“Okay,” she says, but she can’t possibly mean it.
“’m not.”
But she is here this time. And maybe, that could make a difference if he let it.
“Sleep tight,” she says softly, pushing back the fringe of his hair to kiss his forehead.
“That an order?” he asks.
“You want it to be?”
“Mm, dunno.”
“Then sure.”
Well, if it’s an order, maybe.
He follows.